Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG

I'd meant to draw this to everyone's attention last week, but, as was typical throughout October, I was distracted by other things and it slipped my mind until Joe Bloch reminded me of it. Over at Cyclopeatron, there's a post describing an in-store playest of Goodman Games's upcoming (scheduled for late 2011 release, I believe) Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game with Joseph Goodman.

I have to admit that, until now, I was unclear on just what the purpose of the DCC RPG was and what niche Goodman intends it to fill. Fortunately, the Cyclopeatron post answers some of that, the most intriguing part being the following:

According to Joe, his personal motivation behind DCC is to offer an RPG that can, as closely as possible, emulate all of the books presented in the Appendix N of the original AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. Joe said he is systematically reading every book in Appendix N in order to formulate the game mechanics for DCC. One specific example of this is turning. Joe replaced the traditional cleric’s turn undead ability with a more general turn unholy in order to more closely mirror turning as envisioned Poul Anderson and Lord Dunsany. Another example is the totally revamped magic system where the success and/or side-effects of spellcasting can be unpredictable:

That alone piques my interest, but I'll need to know more before I stand up and cheer just yet. One of the fascinating things about D&D is that, while its inspirations are clear, it was never designed to emulate those inspirations in a slavish way, which is why, "Vancian" spellcasting no more faithfully mirrors what we see in The Dying Earth than does the alignment system map perfectly onto Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions version of the same. So, it'll be fascinating to see exactly how Goodman uses the early hobby's literary inspirations to create a new fantasy RPG.